Dead Island

In a reddit Ask Me Almost Anything with Deep Silver creative director Guido Eickmeyer, question after question wondered about the state of Dead Island. After the recent announcement of Dead Island: Epidemic, a MOBA of all thi...

It sounds like parody, doesn't it? The seemingly unstoppable Dead Island series is moving in a strange new direction with Epidemic, a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena game for PC made public today in an oh-so-brie...

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[DC zombie sculpts by Casey Love Designs]
The NPD Group released US sales data for April 2013 two days ago, but a complete lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Destructoid staff has delayed our posting it. Not our fault! Loo...

You've just picked up a game to play with your mates, and you're appropriately excited. Maybe it's Dead Island: Riptide, and you're preparing to slaughter a million zombies all in the name of good fun, or perhaps you're getti...

Dead Island Riptide customers in the UK and Nordic regions are discovering that retail PC copies of the game contain the wrong Steam codes. Redeeming these codes will give gamers a copy of Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition i...

It's like a review that you watch!
Destructoid video reviews are back, sunshine!
Kicking off with the recently reviewed Dead Island Riptide, we're offering a retooled format that aims to be wholly complimentary to the written piece. We give you the straight f...

I'm a bit late with this week's new releases, as I'm still recovering from my wee sister's wedding, where I wracked up an ungodly bar bill. Your sympathy and donations will be greatly appreciated.
It's a busy week, and...

Dead Island: Riptide reviews went live in the graveyard hours of the morning, and ours totally didn't accidentally go up earlier, so don't go believing it did! I had review honors for Destructoid, and I wasn't exactly glowing...

Apr 22 //
Jim Sterling
Dead Island Riptide (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 [reviewed])Developer: TechlandPublisher: Deep SilverReleased: April 23, 2013MSRP: $49.99
Like its predeccessor, Dead Island Riptide is light on narrative, but there's the skeleton of a story in place. The original survivors of the Banoi outbreak have been picked up by a stereotypical, self-destructively shady military organization, and are being held hostage on a ship when the zombies rear their ugly heads again. After an altercation on board, the protagonists wash up on a new island, Palanai, which is dealing with its own zombie crisis. Cue the onslaught of back-and-forth missions!
Riptide isn't billing itself as a sequel, which is probably for the best as it truly feels like an expansion upon the original -- to the point where you can even import your old characters and access their old levels and unlocked skills. Each character has access to some expanded skills and will likely be close to maxing out their progress trees by the time the campaign ends. Despite new abilities, none of the existing four characters play noticeably differently and all of them generally fall back into their hacking or bashing ways. There is, however, the inclusion of a new hand-to-hand combat character, who uses kicks and punches with deadly efficiency.
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As ever, the game is fueled entirely by accepting various fetch and kill quests, picking up progressively powerful weapons to upgrade, and tackling the undead horde with near-mindless hack-n'-slash brutality. The "Borderlands with zombies" vibe has been preserved in totality, with up to four friends able to go online and take down the mutants with their own preferred blades, guns, hammers, and claws. Generic zombies are once again joined by more advanced mutations, including the tank-like Thugs, irritating Screamers, and yet more of those gigantic, straitjacketed Rams. Exactly how many insane asylums are on these islands?
Every good element of Dead Island can be found in Riptide. It's still gratifying to find new weapons and modify them to provide electric, poison, or flame damage. There's still a base enjoyment to be had in carving off limbs and kicking monsters in the head and ass. The rare battles with humans remain the most interesting parts of the game. Cooperative play is as good a laugh as it ever was. None of this has changed.
On the flipside, every single negative aspect of the original game has been preserved with equal care. Combat is still frustrating in its anarchy, with zombies constantly shoving you over, initiating quick-time-events, or surrounding survivors for plenty of three-hit kills. Attacks, yet again, miss with a high frequency due to the difficulty of judging distance amid the first-person chaos, or sometimes just because a weapon passed through the opponents' bodies. Least forgivable of all, the game is as unpolished and unfinished as it was before, with animations lacking decent transitions, and all manner of graphical bugs putting in their seemingly obligatory appearances. In a second game that really hasn't done much extra groundwork on the content front, it's fairly insulting to be given a game that hasn't even improved technically.
This is not to say Riptide doesn't at least attempt a few ideas of its own. At least in terms of scenario, the game tries to stand out, adding new siege-style battles and placing an emphasis on water travel, with boats that can be rammed into enemies with gleeful force. The game's heart is in the right place with sieges, but its delivery is lacking. While there's a certain fun to be had in setting up perimeter fences and placing gun turrets before waves of zombies arrive, once the battle begins it's just more thoughtless chopping with the added annoyances of NPCs who require your constant help. Still, points for giving something fresh a go.
Riptide's biggest failing, however, is in its environment. Balai simply isn't as fun a place to explore as Banoi. The original game's tropical resort was a unique and flavorful setting, giving Dead Island its own sense of personality, and splitting off into various interesting town and prison areas. Banoi had an identity, one players could feel intimately familiar with over the course of their adventures. The frequent backtracking was mitigated somewhat by the generally compelling surroundings.
By contrast, Palanai is a wonted expanse of jungle for the most part, full of linear corridors gated by invisible walls, and indistinct scenery. The game's second major area, Henderson, is a little more interesting, bringing back some of the town aesthetic from the original game, but it's not a patch on the variety found there. The map design feels convoluted, full of winding roads and dead-ends that undermine its open-world presentation; there's an overwhelming sense of environmental clutter, especially in areas littered with alleyways that could go anywhere or nowhere, depending on your luck.
It could go without saying that Riptide is not a pretty game. It looks exactly like the original, which was mutton dressed as mutton. On consoles, textures are muddy, screen-tearing is common, and there are several areas where the framerate drags to an unbearable crawl. None of the visual issues are necessarily dealbreakers, but when you account for this being Techland's second crack of the whip, it becomes much harder to forgive problems that should have been ironed out in patches to the first game, let alone making reappearances in the new one.
Dead Island got away with a lot of its documented problems because, for all its inspiration and all its missteps, there was nothing quite like it on the market. It took many familiar elements to create something far more amusing than it had any right to be.
There is something like Riptide on the market, though -- it's called Dead Island, and it's a far better game, having both the strengths and the weaknesses of Riptide, but presented in a more appealing way and lacking the lingering question of how a developer can essentially reuse masses of assets and still somehow lack the resources to fix anything.
Is Dead Island Riptide a fun game? At times, yes. In terms of raw combat and power fantasy, it's just as good as Dead Island ... and it's just as bad at the same time. The bottom line is that there's no excuse for it not being superior. Being "just as good" isn't good enough, especially not when Dead Island had things on its side that Riptide doesn't. Those new to the series entirely will likely not notice the problems quite so much, and be as forgiving to it as newcomers were to Dead Island. While Riptide banks on you having loved the first, in actuality you have a lot more to gain if you've never touched it.
If you played the first game, however, I'd recommend waiting for a real sequel, because Riptide fails to get away with pulling the same trick twice.
Watch our video review here.

Dead in the water Dead Island Riptide banks on you having really loved Dead Island. We're talking love to an unquenchable degree. Did you adore Dead Island, could you not get enough of its boundless slaughter and tropical zombie abominations? ...

Deep Silver has squirted a slick offering of Dead Island Riptide screenshots for your viewing delight. Low on the zombie visuals, this latest gallery seems intended more to show off the tropical environments which, I can conf...

Dead Island: Riptide might have a $50 price point, but that doesn't mean that it's skimping on the content.
Sebastian Reichert, the game's executive producer, says that players can expect a 20- to 30-hour campaign. "It's...

Sebastian Reichert, the executive producer of Dead Island: Riptide, thinks that exploration will be the shining star of the upcoming open-world zombie survival game.
When asked what the single aspect of Riptide that play...

Oh look, here's a new trailer for Dead Island Riptide. What are you going to do about it? Watch it, probably. Yeah, thought you might. Predictable.
The latest video from Deep Silver does what you expect it to do. There...

Dead Island: Riptide has some new screenshots to show off, and you guessed it -- they have zombies in them. The screens showcase a few areas similar in theme to what we've seen before in the original game, including one brief...

Those that pre-order Dead Island Riptide will be given downloadable content packs. What exactly are in the packs? Here's the break down!
DLC #1: The Survivor Pack
BBQ Blade: Knife that you can set on fire or something
XP/Sta...

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In this latest installment of Office Chat, Jordan Devore, Brett Zeidler, and I consider whether Dead Island's cinematic trailers are misleading and if PC gamers should expect ports of games that utilize the superior power of their hardware. Plus, Nintendo's Virtual Console promotion might be a bit confusing, but represents a pretty good value.

When Dead Island first got our attention, it did so with a bang. The infamous CGI video presented the game's zombie apocalypse as something tragic, personal, and deeply affecting, a far cry from the reality of a game that's m...

Deep Silver has seen fit to grace the realm with nine minutes of Dead Island Riptide gameplay footage. The game's not shown off much moving imagery yet, so this nice hefty chunk is most welcome!
The pre-alpha footage shows o...

Company apologizes after fan backlashDead Island has turned heads since its very inception, but Deep Silver bit off more than it could chew today with its latest promotion for the series. The publisher received a torrent of negative feedback upon unveiling ...

[Update: Deep Silver's US department has wished to make it clear that Zombie Bait Edition is for Europe only, and will not be available in the United States. Instead, it'll only offer the previously announced Collector's Edit...

Dead Island Riptide is getting a Collector's Edition in North America and the contents were all voted on by fans. The "Rigor Mortis Edition" includes a zombie hula girl bobble figure, zombie arm bottle opener, bungalow key, a...

This is a little ridiculous. So, I guess that, in the Dead Island version of the world, Sam B teamed up with Chamillionaire on a track before taking his fateful gig in Banoi. And there's now a music video for it, which ...

If you got bored of the four characters that were in the original Dead Island, I'm sure you'll be happy to know that a fifth playable character is on his way to the Dead Island Riptide roster. John Morgan (who can be seen&nbs...

Dead Island: Riptide will be arriving in North America on April 23 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. Along with the release date info is news of a special edition that you can get if you pre-order the game from partici...

Dead Island first forcibly grabbed the attention of the gaming populace with that trailer, the beautiful bit of digital art that said nothing about the game but got everybody very excited. With Dead Island Riptide, Deep Silv...

Techland has revealed it is working on a new game currently titled Project Hell. Based on a Dead Island mod, this spin-off title will give us first-person brutalizing in a medieval setting.
The game has been spun off fr...

Deep Silver has just announced that Dead Island Riptide is in full development for consoles and PCs. Techland, the same studio that made the original game, is working on the sequel.
More information will be revealed "later th...

Anyone who was looking forward to Dead Island for a narrative that focuses on the emotional side of the zombie apocalypse probably walked away from Techland's latest effort at least somewhat unfulfilled. But if blu...